Like some hokey primetime plot, Barry Diller's quest for media moguldom
needed a third act. Now it can be written. In October, Diller - the man
who built the Fox Network for Rupert Murdoch, then colonized the frontier
of home shopping - gained the distribution he craved when his company,
HSN Inc., bought the Seagram Corporation's USA Network and Sci-Fi Channel.

The drama won't be complete, of course, unless Diller triumphs over the
failures of the preceding acts: his frustrated attempts to take over CBS
and later Paramount. He plans to combine the new cable channels with the
18 broadcast stations he already owns, and battle ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and
Warner Bros. for the eyeballs of American TV viewers. Bet on Barry to craft
a happy ending to his tale. What else would you expect from the inventor
of the Movie of the Week?

Power Up

By Tom Claburn

Canada's Northern Telecom (Nortel), in conjunction with Britain's Norweb
Communications, recently announced a powerful new way to wire the Continent:
high-speed Internet access over power lines. Although service prices and
options haven't been established, one possibility - with a setup cost
comparable
to the price of an ISDN card - would deliver bits at speeds exceeding 1
Mbps. The technology shields data traffic from the disruptive electrical
noise inherent in power cables. Nortel officials see this power-line carrier
as a means to enter Europe's telco-dominated voice and data delivery market
without having to pay their way into the telco-owned local loop.

US residents shouldn't abandon their ISPs yet, though. Differences between
European and US electrical infrastructures will make the service considerably
more expensive stateside. So while US utilities have shown immense interest
in the service, they'll have to overcome its greatest obstacle: sticker
shock.

Pixel Pros

By Janelle Brown

Hey, if golf counts as a legitimate sport, then fragging certainly should.
Or so argue the creators of the Professional Gamers' League, the association
launched by Total Entertainment Network and heavily sponsored by Advanced
Micro Devices. With help from Commissioner Nolan "Atari" Bushnell (left)
and an advisory board of gamers and industry execs, the PGL aims to standardize
the fragmented realm of competitive gaming, turn top players into stars,
and earn gaming a mass audience.

Anyone can join the league, but only the top 128 players in each category
(action and strategy) qualify for the quarterly championships, which will
be broadcast live over the Web and, PGL officials hope, on ESPN or MTV.
Thanks to more than US$1.5 million in big-name sponsorships, the élite
gamers can start paying their rent by annihilating pixel opponents. As
id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead puts it, this could be the Super Bowl
of Quake.

Sixth Coming

By Stephen Jacobs

The Commodore Amiga, dubbed "the world's first multimedia PC" by Byte, is
back - again. Developed by Hi-Toro then sold to Commodore, the computer
hit the streets in late 1985 and met its first public demise with the death
of Commodore in 1994. Though the system disappeared from the mainstream,
Amiga owners have kept the machine alive in a quasi-underground market.
Meanwhile, the German clone manufacturer that bought the OS promptly went
bankrupt, and - after two deals fell through - sold the technology to Gateway
2000 last March. When Amiga Inc.'s Darreck Lisle subsequently began popping
up in several user groups, predictions of another "second coming" - including
PDAs and set-top boxes based on the venerable OS - spread quickly around
the Net. Gateway did not respond to the buzz, choosing to keep quiet until
DevCon, a gathering of professional developers at the Midwest Amiga Exposition
in November. Even if this revival fails, the faithful know the Amiga still
has several lives to go.

Democracy 2.0

By Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

We need a new motor to run government," says Marcel Bullinga, the flamboyant
Dutch new media guru and author of The Net, That's Me. Re: The
Digital Future.
Published last month, Bullinga's book presents grand designs for
that motor, a form of direct democracy based on his prototype software
program, Decision Maker. In 1996, Decision Maker enabled one of the
Netherlands's
first political debates on the Net and grabbed the attention of the Dutch
government. In his new role as senior adviser on new media to the Ministry
of Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment, Bullinga is developing
programs that move beyond Net debate and directly tap citizen's opinions
without the interference of government officials. "The same intelligent
agents that steer airplanes," Bullinga declares, "can be built to steer
government."

Sage of Subversion

By Jennifer Cowan and Ingrid Hein

If subversion is an art form, then Heath Bunting may well be the Michelangelo
of the digital age. The self-taught British hacker calls himself an "artivist"
- part artist, part activist. Employing pirate radio, bulletin board systems,
spray paint, and fax machines, he uses guerrilla tactics to overturn
capitalistic
ideals. In a now-renowned incident, he orchestrated all the pay phones
in London's King's Cross Station to ring at once. More recently, he's been
wreaking havoc on corporate Web sites by fucking with URLs. Two targets
of his online performance-art antics were Nike and Adidas. Anyone using
a search engine to track down either shoemaker was routed to
www.irational.org,
a page with a "URL FOR RENT" sign and a pointer to the competitor's site.
"I'm sure businesses will develop these guerrilla search-engine tactics
soon," Bunting says of his preemptive strike. "You have to fight your enemies
with the same weapons."

Privacy Protector

By Jacob Ward

Think of it as a paparazzi buster. The Sight Laser Detector 400 scans an
area and picks up any and all optical lenses: light intensifiers, binoculars,
and, perhaps most important, the cameras of overeager shutterbugs. Manufactured
by the French company Cilas, the laser detector was originally developed
to protect security forces from snipers using rifles with mounted telescopes.
But Cilas, mindful of the technology's anti-paparazzi potential, plans
to market the detector to public figures interested in a lower profile.

In Britain, where there are few legal guarantees on privacy, and in the
US, where the law is blurry, the detector may be the most effective defense
of privacy available. At the very least, it might save Alec Baldwin and
Sean Penn a few trips to court - and keep their knuckles prettier, too.

ignorance@congress.gov

By Rebecca Vesely

For Don Heath, the issue of who will administer domain names once the US
government opens the system to competition next year just got more complex.
As president of the Internet Society, Heath helped design the International
Ad Hoc Committee's plan to take the DNS global. But now - with the White
House, industry leaders, and everyone else with an opinion already squabbling
over who should control .com, .net, and other lucrative domains - Congress
is threatening to legislate. And congressional reactions to the IAHC plan
"show a laughable misunderstanding of the Internet," says Heath.

At issue is the IAHC proposal to move the registration process to Geneva.
"That is not going to sell very well - not here, not on Main Street," declared
Representative Chip Pickering (R-Mississippi), vice chair of the House
Science Subcommittee on Basic Research, this fall.

"Congress is taking action because the Internet is in the public eye,"
says Heath, "and they're making decisions based on stupid assumptions."
To change those assumptions, Heath has been meeting privately with members
of Congress.

Robo(Music)Cop

By Colin Berry

For Web sites that play or sell music online, the time is coming to pay
the piper - or, perhaps, the guitarist or lead singer. BMI, the music licensing
giant that oversees more than 3 million copyrighted works, recently launched
MusicBot, a modified search engine that sleuths out and monitors use of
music files on the Web. Just as restaurants and radio stations must pay
for the privilege of playing tunes, webmasters will soon be required to
chip in for the broadcast and transfer of music files.

The bot's launch coincides with three new licensing arrangements designed
to police a range of online uses, from high-profile retail sites like CDnow
to homepages blasting "Free Bird." "Our company was created in response
to technology," says Richard Conlon, BMI's vice president of marketing
and business development. "This is another frontier, another step in our
evolution." The only question is: Why was the music industry so slow to
take it?

Pretty Good Security (Privacy Not Included)

By Spencer E. Ante

The transition is now complete: with the release of its Business Security
Suite 5.5 this fall, PGP Inc. has morphed its stand-alone, hard-to-use
freeware program into a slick corporate security solution. The suite integrates
PGP's industrial-strength mail-encryption program with a certificate server
(which can manage hundreds or thousands of public keys) and a policy management
agent (which allows sysadmins to enforce companywide email security policy).

Has PGP caved in to the powers that be? On the surface, this new product
seems to kowtow to FBI demands that software include built-in key recovery.
However, PGP's recovery features are voluntary, not mandatory. "There was
never any intent to satisfy the needs of government," insists founder Phil
Zimmermann. "This was driven entirely by our corporate customers' need
to control the keys to their intellectual property. They won't buy crypto
without key recovery." Which raises another question: Who's more likely
to sneak in netizens' backdoors - Big Brother or The Boss?

Sputnik Lite

By Kristi Coale

The US Department of Energy's Fast On-Orbit Recording of Transient Events
satellite - the first of its kind - was launched into orbit this fall.
The all-plastic FORTE was assembled in much the same way a kid might build
a model airplane. Parts for the craft arrived from the manufacturer cut
into sheets of graphite-epoxy, a composite carbon material used in such
earthbound implements as tennis rackets; five technicians then separated
the hundreds of pieces and snapped them together. With a production cycle
of 10 weeks and a cost of up to US$300,000, FORTE is no faster or cheaper
to build than an aluminum bird. But the weight savings of the 102-pound
frame free the satellite to carry more scientific instruments or spend
a few more days in orbit. And the possibilities for inexpensive mass production
are, well, astronomical.

Tired/Wired

T I R E D

Drug smuggling

T3

Fearing Microsoft

NikeTown

Motorcycle gangs

Tamagotchis

USA Network

Desktop publishing

Pilot

Harold Ickes

W I R E D

Freon smuggling

OC-3

Suing Microsoft

The "Nike Railroad"

Bicycle gangs

Babies

The B-Movie Channel

Desktop counterfeiting

Rex

Ickis from AAAHH! Real Monsters

Raw Data

Reality, Undistorted: It had to happen. Just a few weeks after Steve
Jobs and Bill Gates announced the Apple/Microsoft détente, Jobs
was already having trouble remaining diplomatic about the arrangement.
Delivering the keynote address at the annual Seybold publishing conference
in San Francisco in October, the interim Apple CEO stopped short when it
came to explaining Apple's decision to favor Microsoft's browser over
Netscape's.
"We looked at Internet Explorer," Jobs said, "and thought it was the bett-
... thought it was a great browser." Guess Steve still can't quite bring
himself to shower unqualified praise on the company he once said had "no
taste."

Think "Same": During the same speech, Jobs showed - not once,
but twice - the first commercial in Apple's new "Think Different" ad campaign,
cooked up by TBWA Chiat/Day and featuring images of such innovators as
Einstein, Picasso, and Martha Graham. Chiat/Day is the agency responsible
for the historic "1984" ad that introduced the Macintosh to the world.
Turns out, however, there's nothing different about "Think Different."
It's based on a similar campaign, complete with the faces of historic
personalities,
that another agency cooked up two years ago for - of all companies - IBM,
the Big Brother of the "1984" spot. Visit
www.well.com/~mucas/thinkers.html
to see the similarities.

Larry's Follies: Steve Jobs's good friend Larry
Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Oracle, has long been hot to replace the
PC with the NC, not least because it allows him to poke a sharp stick in
the eye - and the ego - of bigger billionaire Bill Gates. Of course, it
would help his cause if the NC actually worked. At this fall's Oracle OpenWorld
'97 trade show, the all-thumbs Ellison tried to demonstrate before a live
audience the wonders of an NC and server. However, the two were anything
but operable, according to online news service Newsbytes. "Look at those
engineers, running out the door," Ellison shouted at one point. "Stop that
guy!"

More Pathetic Irony: When a caller tried to obtain the text of
the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee amendments to the
Security and Freedom through Encryption bill last fall, a committee staffer
offered to fax a press release. How about email? the caller asked. "Uh,
I can't do that, because of Intelligence Committee concerns about electronic
security," the staffer replied. Isn't that ironic, given today's vote on
encryption legislation? asked the caller. "Yes," came the reply, "I suppose
it is."

Lost World Living Room: The ultimate geek company's ultimate
geek couldn't land the ultimate geek trophy. When an exceedingly rare Tyrannosaurus
rex skeleton named Sue was auctioned off at Sotheby's in October, onetime
prospective buyer Nathan Myrhvold was a no-show. Apparently Microsoft's
big brain sat out the auction after failing in an earlier attempt to grab
Sue. Word is that the prize T-rex was to have taken a prominent spot in
Myrhvold's own home. Perhaps a velociraptor in the foyer will suffice?